Vulture fund dodges laws ‘by charging extra for hot water’

Controversial US vulture fund Cerberus is charging “rent increases by the backdoor” by ordering tenants to pay €250 extra for hot water and heating charges, it has been claimed in the Dáil.

People Before Profit TD Richard Boyd Barrett claimed the vulture fund was evicting tenants in stages from a block of apartments.

He also claimed the National Asset Management Agency (Nama) had refused to sell 15 apartments in Balally, south Dublin, to Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, but had since sold the whole block of 52 apartments to the vulture fund which was now evicting tenants.

He claimed those the fund could not evict immediately were being forced to pay extra, and to avoid Minister for Housing Simon Coveney’s legislation to limit rent increases the fund was charging tenants extra for heating and hot water.

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Mr Boyd Barrett accused the Government of failing to deal with spiralling rents as he cited the case of Robin Hill apartments in Balally, which he said was a “very concrete example of how decisions the Government made in the past six months have contributed directly to this shambles and the hardship that follows”.

He noted a Daft.ie report that rents had increase by 13 per cent or €134 a month on average, which was “guaranteed to further escalate that [housing] crisis and lead to more evictions and more people in homelessness”.

He said the Robin Hill apartments were originally built by the McEvaddy brothers in 2008, and subsequently went into Nama. Since the block went into Nama, half of the apartments had remained empty.

Vacant units

“Dún Laoghaire -Rathdown County Council asked if they could purchase 15 of the vacant units. They were told ‘no, you can only buy the whole block’.”

Nama subsequently agreed the sale of Project Gem, he said, including these apartments, to Cerberus, after which the fund started to evict tenants. He described the sale as “one of the biggest sales of property in the history of the State”.

He said five of the tenants were to be evicted in May. Others who the fund cannot evict straightaway “they are going to have to pay an extra €250 in hot water and heating charges”. That was a “backdoor rent increase”.

“We have 50,000 empty properties in Dublin,” Mr Boyd Barrett said, and that had been created as an “artificially man-made problem resulting from the behaviour of Nama and the vulture funds”.

He said the empty units would not have been sitting there with evictions to follow “if you hadn’t sold to vulture funds and if Minister Coveney had ensured in his legislation that when complexes were sold they could not evict tenants”.

Taoiseach Enda Kenny rejected Mr Boyd Barrett’s claim that it was a policy failure by Government. He said “the problem is the supply of houses all across the country”.

Portfolio

He pointed out that Nama had an €80 billion portfolio to deal with, and was expected to give the taxpayer a €2 billion-plus surplus. He noted that “rent inflation has slowed over the past quarter”.

Mr Kenny said the State had bought 40,000 vacant properties in the last five years, but when Mr Boyd Barrett described that as a “fantasy figure”, Mr Kenny clarified that 1,000 had been purchased by the State for €203 million and “the others are through the normal churn of reconstructions, sales, local authority purchases and so on”.

The Taoiseach said those who acquired Nama properties were “subject to the laws of the land”.

He said Mr Coveney was due to launch a strategy for dealing with 34,000 vacant units in Dublin to bring vacant apartments and dwellings back into use.